War Still a Daily Reality
Despite Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day is coming up a
week from now. Our family marks the day by connecting with
elder relatives who were touched by World War II more than 70 years
ago.

My father-in-law, now in his late eighties, lost a brother in the war
and has never fully recovered from that loss. We also like to
watch the national television broadcast of the Parliament Hill ceremony
and it never fails to move us.

Unfortunately, Remembrance Day isn’t given the respect it once had,
despite the efforts of schools and community organizations to keep it
alive. Some provinces don’t have it as a “day off”, something
that surprised me when I visited Ontario a few years ago.
Many jurisdictions have malls open, albeit on a Sunday
schedule. Of course, lots of people use it as a day to sleep
in or go hunting and don’t dwell on the significance of the day.

But we do live in a different world today. Possibly, we need
to focus on the on-going wars of the present and the terrible loss of
life, limb and property that comes with war, rather than our own
Eurocentric view of war that dips into a past that few younger people
can relate to. Maybe what we need to be talking about is why,
knowing the horrors that war can bring, we allow them to continue.

Research shows that an estimated 51 million people were killed in wars
between 1945 and 2000, the half century after World War II.
And the past decade has been no better. “Highlights” (or low
lights) of this death tolls includes genocides in Central East Africa
(Rwanda and Sudan) and Southeastern Europe (Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia,
etc.).

Political strife and international war in Southeast Asia (Vietnam,
China) also have taken a huge toll. Some parts of Central and
South America have also seen significant loss of life in civil war or
armed dictatorship crackdowns on their populations. As ever, Western
Europe and North America have been largely free of conflict deaths.

Project
Ploughshares, a national church initiative on peace based in
Waterloo, ON, just published this week their 2012
Armed Conflict Report. In it, they list 26
conflicts taking place in 23 countries around the globe. One
of these which we hear a lot about in the media is the Syrian “civil
war” where 70,000 people died last year and 730,000 were displaced,
creating a humanitarian emergency.

Another is the regional war that has centred on the Democratic Republic
of Congo, a large resource-rich nation with several armies, countries
and corporations fighting over and extracting its wealth. In
the DRC, over the past decade, five million people have died in the
conflict.

Other countries that have made the news for conflict and appear on this
list are Iraq and Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia, Pakistan and
India. While each country is unique, certain themes persist
when conflict is considered: economic disparities, religious
or tribal differences, governance issues such as dictatorship or weak
central leadership, and resource wealth coveted by others.
Indeed, as in so many instances, greed and fear are at the heart of
problems, both global and local.

What does all this mean to us? Doesn’t the sacrifice of our
soldiers in the World Wars and other “smaller” conflicts fill up our
agenda? No doubt, we need to keep one eye on the
past. And we find it more relevant to focus on the
contribution and sacrifice of Canadians in conflict
situations. However, it is the “here and now” that we need to
better understand because today’s conflicts also shape our lives.

Examples? War has currently displaced 45.2 million people in
our world. In hard economic facts, that is both a huge loss
of productivity and an enormous cost for the world to deal
with. It is also a festering situation of current insecurity
and even hatred that will lead to future conflicts. War not
only kills and maims people, but it destroys property and
infrastructure (schools, hospitals, factories, agricultural land,
roads, bridges, power lines) which can take a generation to replace.

The way war is waged today means that rape is an everyday occurrence
for women caught up in conflict or living in displacement
camps. It means that armies include tens of thousands of
children pressed into service with the use of liquor, drugs and
brutalizing tactics. It means that war now kills more
civilians than soldiers.

The reality of “today’s war” might be one way to revitalize interest in
Remembrance Day. The classic messages at gravesites, legion
halls and monuments need to be reinvented to bring immediacy to them,
or we are just throwing fancy words and hopes at a problem that won’t
easily go away without greater understanding and resolve. Zack Gross works
for the Manitoba Council for International
Co-operation (MCIC), a
coalition of more than 40 international development organizations.